Brief Acceptancehttp://briefacceptance.com
Moving beyond problems... into LifeTue, 31 Oct 2017 20:31:56 +0000en-GBhourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.8.4Mindfulness Works as Well as Anti-depressantshttp://briefacceptance.com/?p=362
Thu, 28 Apr 2016 17:59:18 +0000http://briefacceptance.com/?p=362Continue reading]]>Here’s an interesting article, with a promising title and just a sprinkling of silliness too.

But the new study – the largest-ever analysis of research on the subject – found mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) helped people just as much as commonly prescribed anti-depressant drugs and that there was no evidence of any harmful effects.

People suffering from depression who received MBCT were 31 per cent less likely to suffer a relapse during the next 60 weeks, the researchers reported in a paper in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.

Unfortunately, it alludes to the recent fad of acknowledging the ‘dark side of mindfulness’. In my opinion, this is a completely unhelpful and largely inaccurate representation.

Some people, we are told, respond negatively to mindfulness. The huge majority do not. In fact, the opposite is true. However, some people who may already be suffering from emotional instability have a negative reaction to mindfulness. Therefore, it is important that we always speak of the ‘dark side’ of mindfulness.

Kindergarten logic, if you ask me!

Nevertheless, enough of my sarcasm. Check out the brief article for a link to the meta-analysis. I prefer such things over headline-grabbing anecdotes.

]]>Identifying Core Values: Integrating ACT and Hypnosishttp://briefacceptance.com/?p=357
Wed, 23 Sep 2015 02:30:54 +0000http://briefacceptance.com/?p=357Continue reading]]>I’m using this post to link to a video by my good cyber-friend, Richard Nongard. He is, as I believe Americans say, good people.

Silly Americans.

Anyway, Richard has an incredible amount of experience in the world of hypnosis and completely vindicated my interest in ACT (when I first came across it over a decade ago), by being one of the few hypnotists I knew who had heard of it.

Check out his video, here, where he discusses combining ACT and hypnosis. More importantly, he aims for this integration at the earliest stage, during the identification of values.

Very useful stuff on integrating Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Hypnosis. And about time too!

Some of the ‘dangers’ listed may seem too obvious for some readers. However, for those just starting-out with meditation – when we have that giddy feeling of excitement – they can be a useful safety net.

Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is a type of psychotherapy developed by psychology researcher Marsha M. Linehan at the University of Washington. Designed originally to help people with borderline personality disorder, it is now also recognized as a useful tool in treating survivors of sexual abuse, people who struggle with chemical dependency, and various mood disorders. It combines cognitive-behavioral therapy techniques that help emotional regulation with mindful awareness and other strategies.

That Facebook conversation lingered with me all day. I have the DBT workbook on my Kindle, but had only glanced at it previously. Last night, I read about a third of it. The concepts and exercises in it are excellent, and one thing really stood out: the concept of Radical Acceptance.

From the workbook:

“Radical acceptance means that you accept something completely, without judging it. For example, radically accepting the present moment means that you don’t fight it, get angry at it, or try to change it into something that it’s not. To radically accept the present moment means that you must acknowledge that the present moment is what it is due to a long chain of events and decisions made by you and other people in the past. The present moment never spontaneously leaps into existence without being caused by events that have already taken place…”

“…it also creates an opportunity to respond to that situation in a new way that’s less painful for yourself and others. In many ways, radical acceptance is like the Serenity Prayer, which says: ‘Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.'”

This resonated with me very deeply. I have been struggling with a social situation lately where I consistently get upset and/or disappointed. I am frustrated by how I am consistently treated. I get apprehensive about the encounter prior to it, get predictably upset when the person acts predictably, and then feel angry and resentful afterwards, sometimes on and off for days. It’s not fun, and there’s not much I can do about the situation.

This concept of radical acceptance floored me. First of all, if I radically accept the circumstances (and the way this person is), I won’t be nearly as upset by it when it happens again. Also, when I look at the recurrent dynamic, I can see my own role in opening myself up for attack. My need for approval is part of the problem, and so is my wishing that things would be different.

The workbook suggests coming up with “coping thoughts” to arm ourselves against situations that repeatedly bring up overwhelming negative feelings. It struck me that in this situation of mine, it would be immensely helpful to change my story about it. Instead of hoping things would go well next time (and acting in way that I hope will bring approval and deflect criticism), I could completely change my goals around the situation and just go in with the resolve to make it through and not react.

Of course, the authors of the workbook point out that this isn’t about giving up and accepting bad situations, but sometimes there are situations in life that you have to deal with or get through (like a difficult boss or family member or an unpleasant circumstance that for the moment you can’t change).

Do you find yourself overwhelmed by emotions because of difficult circumstances in your life that you wish weren’t so? Could radical acceptance make a difference to the pain these circumstances typically cause you?

It makes sense to me to begin by radically accepting a situation as it is, to just accept it without judging it, even if you normally wish with all your heart that it were different. There is such a peace in this, all the usual noise around the circumstance just dies right down. Can you feel the quiet?

Now, from this place, ask yourself what series of circumstances led to this situation. How did you play a role in it, perhaps through choices or behaviors? How did others contribute? (There is a whole series of questions that the book takes you through, to facilitate the process of radical acceptance.)

This isn’t about having to fix or change anything at this point. It’s just about accepting what is, without judgment, to help you get through the moment in a different way. To help you get through the moment in a less distressing way, to help you survive it with less suffering.

What do you think about this? I really love it, it feels beautiful to me.

“Imagine standing by a fountain in a beautiful garden on a warm summer day.”

The female voice is both soothing and alluring, as she invites you into a garden and guides you toward a hammock.

“It is peaceful and safe. And no one expects anything from you here,” she says. “Here you can escape from the troubles of daily life.”

The birds are chirping. The fountain is gurgling. You close your eyes and relax.

And your pain disappears.

That’s the goal of a meditation program created by Wellmind Media, a UK company that specializes in online courses for managing pain, stress, anxiety and depression.

The 21-minute pain management course hosted at Meditainment.com (click here to see it) takes you into a “secret garden” of your own imagination, designed to help your pain seem less important. Tens of thousands of people have visited the site for pain relief.

“I was able to drift away and place myself somewhere else besides in my chair. I didn’t think about the pain,” said Taber Fellows in an online post.

“Amazing! Way better than painkillers,” wrote Holly Maslen.

“Been fighting a migraine all day, and this helped tone it down to a more bearable level. Will check out the other meditations as well, thank you,” said Kristi Morningstar.

In all, Meditainment offers 18 different online courses (including one to help you sleep) that can take you anywhere from an island paradise to a mountain refuge to an arctic igloo – all without getting out of your chair. The first two courses you watch are free, but gaining access to the other 16 will cost you $15.

“When meditation is used as a form of relaxation when in pain, it can be of great benefit, reducing the fear aspect and emotional responses of experiencing pain as well as changing the contextual evaluation of stimuli, and sensory events,” said Rebecca Millard, Project Manager at Wellmind Media.

“Although we haven’t conducted any scientific research into this ourselves, there is increasing evidence to support meditation for the relief of pain. For us, the testimonials and comments on the pain management meditation speak for themselves.”

Online meditation and “mindfulness” cognitive therapy have been available for several years, and there is increasing evidence showing that they are effective in treating a broad range of mental health issues, including anxiety, depression and stress.

“Mindfulness is about paying attention to the present moment, non-judgmentally, with a gentle curiosity. It’s an awareness that emerges from paying attention on purpose to the present moment. It’s a mind-body approach, which involves paying attention to thoughts, feelings and body sensations,” said Millard in an email to Pain News Network.

“If we have more awareness and understanding of ourselves we can use this as a tool for pain management. Stress is linked to pain and too often pain is seen as something that the body experiences rather than linked to the mind.”

One study, published in the British Medical Journal, found that online mindfulness courses were often just as effective as face-to-face meetings with a therapist.

“The people choosing to use the course in this mode of delivery appear to be finding it helpful,” the study concluded. “That the levels of negative emotion reduced significantly on completion of the online mindfulness course and further decreased at 1 month follow-up is suggestive of significant improvements.”

Radical Acceptance means completely and totally accepting something from the depths of your soul, with your heart and your mind. You stop fighting reality. When you stop fighting you suffer less. That means you don’t feel hot anger in your stomach whenever you see the person who got the promotion you deserved and you don’t seethe with resentment when you see your best friend who is now dating your boyfriend. You accept what is, learn and go forward.

Radical acceptance is easier to understand than it is to practice. There are many obstacles to giving up the suffering of resentments and anger toward others, toward God, or toward the world in general.

I’m not going to disagree with that. However, the funny thing is that it doesn’t have to be hard to practice acceptance. It takes precisely that – practice – but it is possible. And, thankfully, there are a number of tools and techniques out there to support us.

The answer is not to protect yourself from possible future suffering by doing something that creates suffering in the present. In this case, finding a way to go forward in a different way, with wisdom, so you don’t let the same scenario happen again and again.

You can read the whole post here. Or add your own blocks to the comments below.

It is pretty hard to feel content in a world that is consistently offering you the “next best thing”. I mean, how can your possibly pay attention to the now when you can’t wait for the future to arrive?

Because it will be better, right? It will be bigger, faster, more efficient, more effective, more fulfilling and…perfect, somehow.
But how reliable is relying on the future? And what evidence do we have that it will bring a better life than we have now?

The only thing we can be certain of is the now; this moment you’re experiencing as you read this post. And as for the evidence of a better future, well if you’ve yet to experience a moment that truly fulfilled you, even though you have been promised it would a thousand times – by yourself and others, then the likelihood of some distant moment in the future fulfilling your insatiable desires is pretty slim, don’t you think?

The reality is that we spend far too much time mulling over the past and anticipating the future. We look to the future for prosperity and, when it lets us down, we look romantically to the past at the way things once were.

The mind is always trying to take us some place else, to somewhere better, a place we have convinced ourselves will make everything worthwhile, a place where we feel content and fully realise our purpose and place in the world.
But that place doesn’t exist in the future.

In actuality, all that transpires is disappointment. We become increasingly impatient with life as it fails to deliver the perfect picture of happiness advertised to us through a plethora of marketing mediums on a daily basis.

The more we own and achieve the bigger the discontentment grows as the gap becomes impossible to fill. We become unhappier and more stressed, more self-centered and judgemental, more anxious and sleepless, more disenchanted with the world. This impacts negatively on our relationships with others, and on our ability to connect with the true nature of things.

If I had a dime for every time I heard someone say, “Things will be better when I….,” “I’ll be happier when I…”

When what?
When you move house again?
When you get a higher-paying job?
When the kids go off to college?
When you finally take that holiday?
When you get a bigger car?
When you achieve what your parents expected of you?
When you meet Mr/Mrs right?
When you retire with that pension you’ve been slaving to accumulate?

This perpetual cycle of desiring to get to some moment other than the one that’s in our presence is causing us mental suffering. We live in the realm of our imagination, a delusion reliant on the prospect that happiness is just one more purchase, one more action or goal away.

But what if we just stop for a moment? What if we could find absolute contentment in just being here right now?

I assure you that if you let go of the grasping for just a moment, you’ll see just how perfect this moment is and how wonderfully complete you feel.

Because no matter what is going on in your life right now and how you perceive it, this is how it was meant to be in this moment.

Every moment is part of the interdependent transience of life. Mother Nature doesn’t use a clock. There is no time, only a sequence of perfect moments that form our existence. And they can be nothing more than moments, because one only ever exists at any given time.

And if you need any more motivation to free yourself from the cage of contemplation over what the future might bring, remember that one day there will not be another moment to ponder. The cold, hard reality is that you’ll die before that perfect moment you envision ever arrives.
Every moment we wish away, ignore or dismiss as not good enough, we never get back.

Conversely, every moment is ours to seize and appreciate, to love ourselves, others and this amazing world.

Don’t ignore the potential for unconditional joy and fulfilment that can be found in your life right this moment. The way you engage with this moment will have a direct effect on the next, subsequently affecting the level of opportunity and prosperity that opens up in your life.

So today, bring your mind home. Stop longing for something better to happen, to have more than you own or to be someone else, somewhere else.

There is no perfect moment to come. There will never be a more perfect moment that this one. Because this moment is absolutely as it is supposed to be.

There is no “I’ll be happy when…” moment that will fill that longing for self-actualisation deep in the pit of your stomach. And you know this to be true because every time you get to that new product, have that new partner, reach that new goal, it isn’t long before you the emptiness creeps up on you again to let you know that you still don’t have that sense of achievement and contentment you were seeking. And so you set a new target, and the cycle continues….

Your happiness doesn’t reside in the future, and it hasn’t passed you by, either. It’s right here.

Step into this most beautiful moment and connect with your existence. Life is happening right now. Don’t miss out.

]]>Acceptance and commitment therapy in the treatment of chronic painhttp://briefacceptance.com/?p=314
Wed, 09 Sep 2015 01:04:38 +0000http://briefacceptance.com/?p=314Continue reading]]>JoAnne Dahl and Tobias Lundgren discuss the use of ACT for the treatment of chronic pain.

They start off with a fascinating observation:

A radical and provocative conclusion drawn by the authors of a Swedish government evaluation (van Tulder, et al., 2000) of all established medical treatments offered today was that the best treatment a primary care physician could give a patient with chronic pain was nothing. Providing no treatment at all had far better results than any of the medical solutions offered today for chronic pain. Most of the pain treatments are designed for and useful for acute pain but used in the long run may create more problems such as substance abuse and avoidance of important activities. Pain, in itself, is an inevitable part of living. Without it we could not survive. The common element in most of the pain treatments developed in western cultures over the past 50 years is that they emphasize avoiding pain or fighting to reduce pain. When pain was unavoidable, we tolerated it. When pain became avoidable, it became intolerable. What we have created, with all of our painkillers and pain management strategies, is an intolerance and increased sensitivity to pain.

And they continue:

Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT; Hayes, Strosahl, & Wilson, 1999) is an acceptance and mindfulness based approach that can be applied to many problems and disorders, including chronic pain. It appears to be a powerful therapeutic tool that can reduce suffering both for the client and the treating professional. ACT emphasizes observing thoughts and feelings as they are, without trying to change them, and behaving in ways consistent with valued goals and life directions. ACT has shown promising results in several recent studies (Bach & Hayes, 2000; Bond & Bunce, 2000; Dahl, Wilson & Nilsson, in press; McCracken, Vowles & Eccleston, 2004; Zettle, 2003).

The basic premise of ACT as applied to chronic pain is that while pain hurts, it is the struggle with pain that causes suffering. The pain sensation itself is an unconditioned reflex serving the function of alerting us to danger or tissue damage. The noxious sensation of pain is critical for our survival. The same applies to emotional pain, such as the “broken heart” we feel from the death of a loved one or loss of a relationship. We know that it is natural and necessary to feel such pain in the mourning process in order to heal and go on with our lives. In the case of chronic pain, causal and maintaining factors may be unclear, and efforts to reduce or eliminate the pain may be unsuccessful. In these cases, continuing attempts to control pain may be maladaptive, especially if they cause unwanted side effects or prevent involvement in valued activities, such as work, family, or community involvement (McCracken, Carson, Eccleston, & Keefe, 2004).

What does it mean when a friend, family member, or therapist tells you that you need to try to accept a situation you’re struggling with? Is this reasonable advice, or is it just annoying and impossible?

Acceptance is a key concept and a good step toward effective coping with a tough situation, but it has to be properly explained. Friends and psychotherapy clients to whom I propose acceptance of their respective difficult situations say things like, “If I accept that I drink too much, if I accept my partner leaving, if I accept my chronic pain, doesn’t that mean I’m just giving up–that I’ll become an alcoholic, that I’ll be alone forever, that my pain will take over my life?”

No.

Acceptance does not mean passive resignation. Resignation means giving up because you’ve decided that there’s nothing you can do about your situation, whereas acceptance simply means that you accept that your situation happened. It doesn’t mean that you like what’s happening or that you don’t wish it were different, but once you give up the resistance and denial, you can take the energy you were spending on struggling and use it to decide how to respond or what to do next. In this way, acceptance can be liberating.

Examples:
I had a client who had a problem with binge drinking at social gatherings. When he attended events with unlimited alcohol (e.g., his work Christmas party, a wedding with an open bar), he invariably drank way too much and either made social faux pas or became physically ill and left early, both outcomes that caused him significant distress. Friends had suggested various practical strategies to him, such as setting a number-of-drinks limit in advance, not sitting near the bar, and alternating each drink with a glass of water; the strategies worked well, but he rarely applied them. Why? Because applying a strategy required acknowledging to himself that he had a problem; instead, before a party, he would tell himself that he could handle it, that the open bar wouldn’t be a problem for him this time. After some work on acceptance, my client was able to accept the fact that he had a binge drinking problem; he began using the strategies consistently, significantly decreasing his distress and effectively eliminating the problem behaviour.

I had a client whose partner left her. She was unable to accept that the relationship was over, and spent a ton of energy on begging and threatening phone calls, emails, and texts, trying to get her ex to come back. The months during which she couldn’t or wouldn’t accept the end of the relationship stalled the necessary grieving process and prevented her from moving forward. When she finally accepted that her relationship was over, she was still sad and disappointed, but she also felt some relief–the struggle to hold onto the relationship was over, freeing up mental space that she used to look for a new apartment, consider dating again, and start settling into her new circumstances.

Finally, acceptance is a big issue for chronic pain patients. Unfortunately, chronic pain can often only be managed, not cured, and at some point, most patients are told that some degree of pain will always be present and that they need to accept it and find ways to adapt. This is hard, and many patients continue to consult specialist after specialist, seeking a different diagnoses or new treatment options. Eventually, with or without psychological help, some patients come to accept the diagnosis of chronic pain; they are then able to take the time and energy spent on resistance and medical consultations and redirect it toward improving quality of life and learning to live well despite pain.
Acceptance sounds easy but isn’t. It takes significant strength and motivation to let go of how you think things should be or how you wish they were, and to work wisely and effectively with your reality, especially when you don’t like it. Accepting can be the hardest and bravest thing you can do.

]]>EFT for the treatment of trauma in Veteranshttp://briefacceptance.com/?p=302
Mon, 07 Sep 2015 23:46:32 +0000http://briefacceptance.com/?p=302Continue reading]]>Our inclusion of EFT as a Brief Acceptance therapy is not accepted by everyone. Understandably, many adherents of EFT describe it as a technique that works due to tapping on Meridians.

We disagree. Our position is that the reason that EFT works is primarily because it is a kinaesthetic process of acceptance.

Nevertheless, both sides accept that EFT does appear to have some great successes under its belt. Adding to that record, the following paper assesses EFT’s efficacy in treating PTSD and comorbid symptoms and its long-term effects: